Introduction

The National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) cancer Human Biobank (caHUB) program is pleased to release to the public
a compendium of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that are currently guiding the successful collection of normal human
biospecimens for the NIH Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project. caHUB is releasing these SOPs to the public to provide
transparency about the biospecimen collections that caHUB is conducting for the GTEx program and to enable high quality
biospecimen collection by others in the research community.

The cancer Human Biobank Initiative (caHUB)

The cancer Human Biobank (caHUB) initiative was established by the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI)
Biorepositories and Biospecimen Research Branch (BBRB) to provide a national biobanking infrastructure governed by
standardized methods for biospecimen collection, annotation, storage and distribution. Biospecimens are tissues
and fluids taken from the human body and used for diagnosis, analysis and research.